UNT Press

About Ellis and McCaslin's Texas Cotton and Confederate Finance

Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, the commander of the Confederate Department of the Trans-Mississippi, wrote in January 1864 about the Cotton Bureau, “In my judgement it is destined to be one of the most powerful agencies upon which we must rely in the inevitable struggle for supremacy in this Department.” Kirby Smith had taken command of the department in 1863 only to discover that efforts to support the Confederate military in that region with cotton, the primary local resource, were failing. The Trans-Mississippi relied on cotton more than any other Confederate department, and Texas was the main source of cotton for the western Confederacy. Kirby Smith struggled to develop a better way to swap that commodity for military goods. The bureau became his principal supply agency, and it did remarkably well in tandem with other efforts to benefit from cotton. In the end Kirby Smith got far more from Texas cotton than he got from Richmond officials.

This is an administrative history of efforts to exploit Texas cotton to sustain the Confederacy in the Trans-Mississippi. No one has previously published such a study, in part because the tale is incredibly complex. L. Tuffly Ellis began writing this history, and finishing the task fell to Richard B. McCaslin, his former doctoral student, after Ellis passed away. At first the Confederacy used private contractors during the first year of the war to move cotton, then at least two state agencies, a host of Confederate agents, the Cotton Bureau, and finally a branch office of the Confederate Treasury. There was also the Cotton Office, the most important subagency of the bureau, which operated from Houston.

Unfortunately for the Confederates, they experienced as many lost opportunities as they did successes. The weak Union blockade offered a great opportunity, and lots of Texas cotton went overseas, but the Confederacy did not fully take advantage of these circumstances. During and after the war, stories circulated about corruption and fraud, but there is little evidence of that. Instead, the real flaws in the system were inefficiency and conflict.